How Would the Media Treat Lorena Bobbitt Today?

When Lorena Bobbitt appeared on The Steve Harvey Show last November, she was met with an extended standing ovation. Harvey was visibly bemused and befuddled as the mostly female crowd applauded, hooted, hollered, and even raised the roof for a woman whose sole claim to fame was an act of violent disfigurement two decades earlier. Daytime television is often bizarrely frenetic, but this was something else, practically a moment of mass catharsis.

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In case you missed it: twenty-three years ago today, a woman then known, and still professionally known, as Lorena Bobbitt (née Gallo) chopped off then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt's penis and threw it in a field after an alleged sexual assault. Police recovered the detached organ, and an urologist and a plastic surgeon spent nearly 10 hours reattaching it. The resulting media frenzy around this story, which ideally might have resulted in a serious national dialogue about abuse and a woman's rights to self-defense, instead proved primarily productive in the field of dick jokes.

It's not hard to understand dick jokes, of course. They're a universal language. The problem is the degree to which said dick jokes obfuscated an essential conversation.

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Why, more than two decades on, does this story still boil down to a gag? More importantly, why do the jokes always seem to come so long before mentioning the alleged—and, if John's subsequent actions and general scumminess are any indication, extremely likely—history of abuse leading up to the incident, if it's mentioned at all? Why was the news back then always about John's dick, and almost never about Lorena's struggle? Were the powers that be too busy nursing their castration anxiety and sympathy pains to countenance the notion that maybe Lorena's actions were as justified as any act of extreme physical violence can be?

Were the powers that be too busy nursing their castration anxiety and sympathy pains to countenance the notion that maybe Lorena's actions were as justified as any act of extreme physical violence can be?

Please don't get me wrong: disfiguring somebody's genitals is categorically not a heroic act. When it happened, though, those who deigned to defend Lorena's actions as an act of self-defense, let alone a by-any-means-necessary reclamation of personal agency, were routinely shouted down, if they could even be heard at all above the din of morning show, "John, Where's The Beef?" vulgarity. It wasn't just men doing the shouting down, either: around the time of the trial, the Chicago Tribune ran a massive piece by English professor Regina Barreca which presumes that Lorena was acting on revenge impulses, completely glossing over any charges of abuse. Controversial social critic Camille Paglia questioned the abuse charges outright, calling Lorena's actions "cruel and barbarous" and even warning/enthusing that "I think this will be having the effect of a revolutionary act by a woman, somewhat equivalent to Charlotte Corday killing Marat in his bath just after the French revolution," after which more than one outlet took the "revolutionary act" sentiment out of context to further their alarmist Lorena-Bobbitt-as bad-influence-on-women narrative (a move which also served to paint Paglia as more of a radical feminist than her work would generally suggest).

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What so much of the sensationalist reportage of the time failed to consider is how essential it was to have the dams burst open when it comes to conversations about abuse. It was, and is, a public necessity well worth the cost of one dude's dong (and besides, as John's short-lived porn career attests, the sacrifice was temporary, unless you count public knowledge of his "frankenpenis" as a cooperatively-held sacrifice). Even if everything John Bobbitt said on the stand were true—that Lorena herself had been physically abusive, that hers was an act of unfounded jealousy, and so on—this was a squandered opportunity on our part.

Would the media approach this story differently now? One hopes so, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, we are yet again at an important crossroads in how we, as a country, talk about physical and sexual abuse. People are listening more to survivors' stories, and far more are erring on the side of believing them; however, said stories remain woefully, incalculably underreported, and even more woefully called into question by Men's Rights Activists and their ilk.

Still, it's unlikely that today's more enlightened and female-friendly Saturday Night Live would be so tone deaf as they were in 1993, when Al Franken's hapless non-therapist Stuart Smalley made Lorena Bobbitt apologize to John's penis. Take your progress where you can, I guess?

If all Lorena Bobbitt had done were cutting off someone's penis, I'd concede that she probably shouldn't be treated as a hero. She should be held up as a survivor more than she is as the punchline of a crass joke, however, and she's downright noble to use her notoriety—and publicly maintain a surname associated with horrible trauma—in order to help victims of domestic abuse. If Steve Harvey, or anyone else, is truly still confused as to why she receives a standing ovation today, we still have a long road ahead of us.